Wreckers hoping to capture state title

The Staples High School girls gymnastics team can double its pleasure on Saturday when the Lady Wreckers, fresh off their FCIAC championship, look to add a state title to an already banner season.

While the SHS program is still looking for its first state crown, the FCIAC championship the Wreckers won on Feb. 12 was the school's third. There was some question, however, when the last one was.

Several publications, including this one, wrote it was Staples' first league title since "the late 1970s." Close, but it was actually a few years later in 1981.

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In fact, that was the second of the Wreckers' back-to-back FCIAC championships. And they won both by the closest of margins.

In 1980, Staples finished with 116.3 points to edge three-time defending champion Greenwich by 0.9 points. In what was the closest FCIAC Championship Meet ever, only 2.3 points separated the top five teams.

The following year was even closer as the Wreckers scored 125.4 while Wilton finished runner-up, just 0.4 points behind.

"We always had good teams at Staples," Lorraine Duffy, who coached the Staples team back then when she was known as Lorraine Scaviola, recalled Monday afternoon. "But either Greenwich or Darien always won the FCIAC.

"After a couple of years I remember we beat Darien and then we beat Greenwich to win the FCIAC."

Indeed, the Wreckers went 7-2 during the regular season, losing to Greenwich and Andrew Warde, but beat out both those teams and seven others to finish first at the 10-team field.

Senior gymnast Jayne Dean led Staples to the title as she won two of the four events and the all-around with a 33.2. Dean and four other seniors graduated from that team, but the Wreckers quickly reloaded, thanks to the addition of freshman Wendy Spivack.

Like Dean the year before, Spivack, only 14, won two events and the all-around title with an accumulated score of 36.5 as Staples nipped Wilton, which had gone 16-0 that season.

"They still send me Christmas cards," Duffy laughed when she heard the names Dean and Spivack. "Sue Bryk was another girl on those teams who still sends me a card every Christmas and she has four kids now. It makes me realize I'm getting older, but I forget I was only 21 when I started coaching at Staples. I was only three years older than some of the girls I was coaching."

The back-to-back titles came in Duffy's fourth and fifth seasons at the Westport school and in her sixth season she led the Wreckers to a 10-1 record and the Eastern Division championship.

But Greenwich regained FCIAC supremacy with 124.7 points, while Wilton finished a close second again with 123.95 and Staples third with 121.7 as Spivack won two more events and repeated as all-around champ.

Freshman Tina Spurkeland added a win in the floor exercises to give the Wreckers first-place finishes in three of the four events, but they still fell short.

It would be 28 years before the Wreckers reigned supreme in the conference again, and their third title was even closer than the first two as they edged rival Darien by .175 points, 134.975 to 134.8.

Duffy, now a guidance counselor at Valley Regional High School in Deep River, was off from school last week and didn't hear about Staples winning the championship until she returned from a vacation in Mexico late Sunday night.

"No, I hadn't heard," she said. "But it's very exciting and they should be very proud, especially since they had not won in a long time."

Duffy, who coached at Staples until 1986 and then was the women's gymnastics coach at the University of Bridgeport for 17 years, is still close to the sport as a judge on the collegiate and club level. She's seen firsthand how much the sport has changed, which is evident when you compare the score Staples won its first title with in 1980 - 116.3 points - to the 134.975 this year.

"The scoring, of course, has changed and the requirements are different," she explained. "The rules change every two or four years."

There was one similarity, however, between Staples' first FCIAC title and this latest one. Rachel Sanfilippo also captured the all-around championship for the Westporters - in fact, she won all four events - but just like this year, other girls stepped up for the Wreckers 29 years ago.

"They were some fun kids. They worked hard and had fun and I think that was all part of it. They realized other things were important no matter how good we were.

"I always felt there were other things besides winning. I tried to teach them about life, about working hard, about winning, about losing. It was not always about winning. Did we want to win? Sure, but it wasn't always about that."

Nearly three decades and another FCIAC championship later, things really haven't changed that much at Staples High School.

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Speaking of those 1980 and '81 Staples gymnastics teams, they've never really been properly recognized for winning the FCIAC title among the many championship banners in the SHS gymnasium.

That will soon change, however.

"I went to the gym one day to see about adding the numbers '2009' to the gymnastics banner when I realized there was no banner," current Staples coach Melissa Zigmont said last week. "Sue Skutnick (the athletic department secretary) and I looked all over the gym for it. We were trying to find some history because we didn't know when the last time Staples won the FCIAC."

That will soon be corrected, according to Zigmont. A new banner will be ordered soon that will hang in the Staples gym under the heading "Girls Gymnastics" and the years 1980, 1981 and 2009 listed under FCIAC Championships.

Of course, they might want to hold off on ordering it until after this weekend, just in case they have to add a first-ever state title to the banner.

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The Wreckers won the championship without the services of junior Emma Vaimberg, one of their leading scorers and most consistent gymnasts all season, who fractured her patella right before the FCIAC meet.

But several girls stepped up and picked up the slack, especially on the uneven bars, usually one of Staples' weakest events.

"We took first, fourth, fifth and sixth on bars. Our top four girls all placed," Zigmont said. "Bars are where we're usually three points down. That's why we scored 131 instead of 134."

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Staples wasn't the only area team undermanned for a league championship meet. Weston, which lost senior co-captain Chloe Slovak for the entire season to shoulder surgery, also saw its other senior co-captain, Megan Wietchoff, suffer a season-ending injury when she broke her arm just two meets into the season.

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At least one season-ending injury had a happy ending. Robby Toole, a member of the Staples football team in the fall, had to miss his senior wrestling season because of injury.

But Toole ended up being one of the managers of the Staples gymnastics team this winter.

"He loves wrestling, but because of his injury he really couldn't go on the mat and wrestle with the team even in practice," Zigmont said. "He knew some of the girls on the gymnastics team so he started coming around when we practiced and kind of became one of our managers.